


For a Sith

by NeurotropicAgentX



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Gen, Lightsabers, Remix, Sith Training, TW - Torture, Training, force ghost
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-30
Updated: 2016-07-30
Packaged: 2018-07-27 15:34:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7624198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeurotropicAgentX/pseuds/NeurotropicAgentX
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>‘It seems you cannot destroy me, Jedi, and it would be… unwise for me to kill you.’</p>
<p>Remix of <i>For a Jedi</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For a Sith

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [For a Jedi](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6020194) by [NeurotropicAgentX](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeurotropicAgentX/pseuds/NeurotropicAgentX). 



> I ~~ruined~~ remixed [For a Jedi ](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6020194). This is a point of difference AU where Force Ghost!Maul _can_ use the Force to interact with the physical world. Can be read as a stand-alone. Please heed the tags. This is all my editor’s fault. Huge thank you to her for all the assistance with this.

The plinth in the centre of the room was untouched by the erosion and weathering that affected the rest of the ruin. The carvings around the base were deep and written in some arcane script. Rey approached. Her senses hummed with the Force as she strained to detect any threats. 

On top of the plinth rested a long metal cylinder. The artefact would have been recognisable as a lightsaber even without the low-key ripple in the Force that surrounded it. Rey reached out to it, hesitating at the last moment. Her heart was beating too fast. She scowled and scrubbed her sweating palms against her robes. Then she snatched up the lightsaber. 

The ruin stayed silent around her. Rey let out a long breath that she hadn’t noticed she been holding. As she turned to leave, a blue glow flickered in the corner of her vision. She spun around. There was nothing there, though something plucked at her sense of the Force. Rey stared at the empty room for a long moment before finally leaving. 

///

Rey left the ancient lightsaber untouched for a full day. She spent her time building up a fire-pit and crude shelter before scouting the surrounding forest. The distractions eventually ran out. There was something about the weapon that made her uneasy, but the way it fitted together was fascinating and appealed to the mechanic in her.

Rey turned it around in her hands, noting the extra heft and its symmetrical design. It almost looked like two lightsabers. Rey frowned and attempted to activate it. Twin beams of red light appeared at either end, but instead of crackling, they were as unwavering as the one from her blue lightsaber. She held out the weapon for a better look, noting the similarities between it and a staff. Master Skywalker had begun teaching her lightsaber katas, but after years of relying on her staff, using another weapon felt wrong. A weapon like this one, however…

Rey let out a slow breath to centre herself. Her body moved into the first position of a simple set of exercises that she had developed for using her staff back on Jakku. The weight of the saberstaff was different, but the reach was familiar and her body sang with the welcome strain. Rey moved through two more sets and was just starting a third when she was interrupted. 

‘Jedi.’

Rey swung around, pointing the lightsaber staff at the intruder. Pain flared against her rib as the other beam grazed her side. She yelped and swung the weapon out from her body. The figure standing before her had raised a hand and sudden pressure wrapped around Rey’s throat. She had the sense to drop the staff before her hands went to her throat. Of course there was nothing there. She could sense the use of the Force, but her attempts to break the hold where futile.

The figure stalked toward her. As the distance between them closed it became obvious that he was a zabrak, but everything from his body to his robes was limned in a strange blue glow unlike anything she had seen before.

Rey tried to strike out at him, but he stepped back easily with the oxygen deprivation slowing her movements. A cruel smile twisted his lips as he watched her choke. Her pulse pounded in her head and every instinct in her cried out to take another breath. Her vision started tunnelling. The zabrak seemed to flicker.

He growled under his breath as his form wavered. The pressure melted away. Rey fell to her hands and knees, coughing and gasping. She watched the zabrak out of the corner of her eye. He’d stopped flickering. Her fists curled against the ground. She snatched up the saberstaff, standing and activating it in one sweeping motion, and thrust the end through the zabrak’s chest. 

He looked down at the blade. Rey hadn’t felt any resistance from his body at all. She wrenched the weapon around and tried to behead him. The beam passed through him like he wasn’t there at all. Rey dropped the saberstaff, drew her blaster and fired several shots into his torso. The bolts passed right through him. He was smiling at her.

‘It seems you cannot destroy me, Jedi, and it would be… unwise for me to kill you.’

‘Who the kriff are you!?’ Rey demanded, breathing hard.

The zabrak regarded her for a long moment. ‘I am Darth Maul.’

Rey knew enough about the old legends to know what ‘Darth’ meant as a title. She looked into Maul’s eyes and tried to calm her feelings. ‘You will go away and leave me alone.’ She poured her will into the Force, trying to _make_ the statement true. ‘I will never see you again.’

Maul snorted. ‘Jedi tricks won’t work on me. You should try something stronger. You have power, use it.’ He took a step forward, but didn’t seem like he was trying to threaten her this time. 

Rey’s raised a hand and tried to throw Maul backwards. He didn’t move at all.

‘Not like that,’ he said. ‘You are angry, afraid, use _that_.’

Rey’s heart started beating faster as she realised what he meant. There was a darker kind of Force power. During her training with Master Skywalker, she’d occasionally brushed up against it, but she’d always recoiled. The dark side felt like something thick with putrescence and decay. 

‘No.’

Maul made a derisive noise, but his expression turned thoughtful. ‘You have good instincts to kill a threat and you are strong in the Force, even if you won’t use it properly, yet. You will become my apprentice. I will teach you the ways of the Sith and undo the Jedi corruption.’

Rey stared at Maul. ‘No. No to all of that. I am not becoming your apprentice and I’m certainly not becoming a Sith.’ 

The cruel smile slid back across Maul’s face. ‘I was not asking.’

Rey had just enough time to register a change in the Force before blinding pain overwhelmed her body. She collapsed to the ground, screaming and convulsing as crackling surges of dark side energy tore into her. Glowing blue filaments were arced from Maul’s fingertips. 

Rey was no stranger to pain. She’d felt everything from deep clawing hunger, and painful UV burns to the beatings she’d taken after losing a fight over scavenging grounds. This was like nothing she’d ever experienced. The agony felt deeper, like it was hurting more than just her body.

It stopped. Rey lay panting on her back, willing her muscles to unclench and give her back control. Maul knelt beside her head. ‘Are you ready to learn or will I hurt you further?’

‘You can’t… make me – _want_ to,’ Rey panted, half-expecting Maul to start torturing her again.

‘I do not need willingness, only cooperation. Having fear, anger and hate for me is natural. It is Sith. Will you learn?’ Maul asked.

Rey thought through her options. ‘Yes.’ She left unsaid how she’d cooperate up until the moment she found a way to kill him.

Maul smiled down at her. ‘Good, apprentice. Keep the goal of my death in mind, it will help to make you strong.’

Rey flinched away and broke eye contact. ‘Stay out of my head.’

Maul seemed amused by that. ‘Learn to keep me out, apprentice.’

///

Maul was bizarrely dedicated to the idea of training her. Rey had expected a focus on the dark side, but the first thing Maul ordered her to do was learn new practice katas with the saberstaff. Apparently her earlier attempt to use it had bothered him enough to spend hours drilling the proper stance and grip. 

The katas were more intuitive than what she’d learned under Master Skywalker, but Maul’s teaching technique was brutal. She was only permitted to use the live weapon and she burned herself several times in the course of an hour. 

‘No, position the lower blade to the left!’ Maul snarled at her. He wrenched the weapon around with the Force, mimicking the recoil from a block. Rey yelped as pain scored down her side. ‘And that’s why,’ he said. ‘Again.’

Rey scowled and repositioned the saberstaff. She extended it in a series of high, mid and low strikes, focusing on the differences between this weapon and her old staff.

‘Good,’ said Maul. ‘Again.’

She repeated the exercise, forcing her over-worked muscles to obey. The tip of the saberstaff dipped on the mid-strike as her biceps cramped. Maul raised an arm, pushing the blade lower with the Force, until its twin grazed her side again. The pain of searing flesh overwhelmed Rey for a moment and she automatically flicked off the blade.

Maul growled and stepped forward. A burst of Force energy streamed from his hands and ripped through Rey. She screamed. The pain stopped after half a second. It felt much, much longer.

‘Don’t _ever_ let your weapon fail or you will be killed,’ Maul snarled. 

Rey’s breaths were ragged as she reactivated the saberstaff. ‘I can’t go on like this,’ she said. Her arms felt heavy with fatigue.

‘Unsurprising. You haven’t touched the Force once during this session.’ Here Maul tilted his head and considered her. ‘It is impressive that you lasted so long.’

‘How am I supposed to touch the Force like this?’ Rey demanded. ‘You keep hurting me and I can barely think straight!’

A faint smile flickered across Maul’s face. He stepped forward, ignoring the active blades of the saberstaff. Rey held her ground, resisting the impulse to flinch back. ‘Ah, Jedi. You need to _use_ the pain and rage that you’re bleeding into the Force. If you reach out for the dark side, it will help you survive.’

Rey shivered. Her entire life revolved around survival, but she wouldn’t reach out. The dark side was a huge chilling tide, surrounding her and Maul. It lapped against him, twisting and invading, but for now it stayed clear of her. The threads of her light side training kept it away.

‘I’m not touching the dark side,’ Rey said. 

Maul stared at her for a long moment. ‘Then you will run through the katas one more time before I let you rest and eat. Perhaps that will help convince you.’

Rey snarled at him and repositioned the weapon. ‘It won’t.’

Maul didn’t respond, merely waving his hand. ‘Again.’

///

As soon as they were done training for the day, Rey dropped the saberstaff to the ground. She didn’t want to touch the weapon that had burned her so many times until she had to. When she was halfway back to the campsite, Maul appeared in front of her. Rey flinched back.

‘What!’ she snapped, heart pounding.

‘Pick up the weapon.’

‘Why?’ Rey asked belligerently.

‘Because I said so,’ Maul hissed. ‘You should keep your weapons close and not stray too far from them.’

Rey narrowed her eyes, but retrieved the weapon.

Later, sitting by her fire, Rey’s thoughts played over the events of the day. Her body ached from the harsh training session and the pain from the Force energy Maul had unleashed lingered somewhere deep in her bones. He was watching her from across the fire pit. 

‘What are you?’ Rey asked.

Maul tilted his head, considering. ‘A ripple in the Force.’

This was the first time he’d answered a direct question that wasn’t about lightsaber training and Rey needed more information. ‘What does that mean?’

Maul looked vaguely uncomfortable. ‘I died. Yet now I am here. I felt something when you picked up my weapon, in my awareness, and then suddenly…’ Maul trailed off with a shrug. ‘Some mysteries of the Force are beyond me.’

Rey stared down at the crackling flames as ideas began to form in her mind. Now that she was ignoring him, Maul had started meditating. She could feel it in his Force signature. There was little sense of him usually, and Rey could only detect him when he was meditating or actively channelling large amounts of power. He was strong.

Rey turned her gaze to a large rock lying near her bedroll. It was rough and pitted with age, but seemed heavy and strong. Rey kept her thoughts idle, even as she unclipped the saberstaff from her belt and laid it in front of her. She closed her eyes and began her own meditation in the Jedi style that Master Skywalker had taught her.

Her breaths became soothing and rhythmic as she blocked out her surroundings and the demands of her body. Time faded in and out of her awareness and she let the sense of the Force enfold her. After an indeterminable amount of time, her ideas crystallised into something definite. She moved, keeping her actions separate from her intent. 

The rock was in her hand. The saberstaff was before her. Rey brought the rock down with all the strength as she could muster, holding the weapon in place with the Force. There was a loud crunch. Beneath the rock, the saberstaff broke into several pieces. Rey’s heart was pounding as she looked back up. Maul was watching her steadily. He hadn’t even stood.

‘You didn’t stop me,’ she said.

Maul shrugged. ‘I could feel that I did not need to. It is right for you to try to destroy me.’

Rey braced for some form of retribution. When none came, she looked down at the damaged weapon. Maul followed her gaze. ‘Fix the damage. If you can’t do it by sunrise, I will hurt you,’ he said matter-of-factly.

Rey shivered. ‘How? I don’t have any tools.’

Maul smiled from where he sat. ‘Use the Force, my apprentice. It will be a good exercise.’

///

Despite everything, their routine became established. There would be intensive, brutal training, followed by time to rest and heal. All the while Maul would tell her that using the dark side would make everything simpler. Rey never once reached out, instead focusing on the few light side techniques she’d managed to learn from Master Skywalker. She also kept an eye out for a chance to escape or somehow destroy the Sith ghost.

Maul didn’t follow her all the time, or at least didn’t seem to. These days she left the saberstaff by her bedroll unless she was actively using it. She’d been testing the limits of Maul’s range and how long it took for him to check up on her. Unfortunately, his behaviour was inconsistent and all she could determine was that he’d materialise in front of her whenever she went further than the little steam to the west of the campsite. She was almost certain his absolute range was much further. 

Today she went to the stream and filled her thoughts with as much background noise about bathing as she could. Her true intent was to get back to her ship. If she could just keep the thoughts out of her mind for long enough, she could escape this planet, leaving Maul and the cursed saberstaff behind. Even just using the ship’s comm to call for help would be a chance to get out of this situation, though Rey was always loath to leave her fate in anyone else’s hands.

She also wondered if her ship’s weapons might be able to destroy the saberstaff, where rocks and tools couldn’t, but that would be dangerous. She’d barely managed to repair the damage she’d done with the rock and Maul’s punishment had been… excessive.

Rey wandered around the outskirts of camp, trying to keep her path aimless. Eventually she arrived at her ship. It was exactly as she’d left it and sealed against intrusions from the planet’s wildlife. Rey keyed in the entry pass code. 

Moving quickly and quietly, she ducked inside and went to the cockpit with singular purpose. Before she was halfway there, Maul appeared in front of her. Rey froze, her heart hammering in her chest.

‘I do not want to destroy your ship. Once you have accepted your place as my apprentice, and embraced the dark side, we will leave this backwater. However, if you come here again before you are ready, I will damage the drive and strand us both.’

‘I understand,’ Rey replied in a carefully even tone.

Maul raised his hands and Rey flinched, but remained silent. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of begging for the mercy that he’d never give. Rey screamed as the first bolts of Force-lightning wracked her body. The pain felt like it took a long time to ebb away.

Once it was over, Rey got to her feet. Maul was watching her impassively, with his arms folded beneath the wide sleeves of his robes. Rey left the ship, a little unsteady on her feet. She planted one hand against the cool metal exterior and rested for a few moments. 

Out of the corner of her eye, Rey caught a glimpse of smoke. It was curling from the top of the mountain, just at the east edge of her camp. That was way too much smoke to be coming from a campfire and she knew from orbital scans that there weren’t any large cities or industry centres on this planet. It took her several long moments to remember what she had seen during the landing. Volcanoes. 

///

Rey was getting desperate. Stealth hadn’t worked. She couldn’t keep her intentions completely hidden from Maul. After a particularly harsh bout of training, she clipped the saberstaff to her belt and started climbing the mountains. Maul’s presence followed her. She sensed him like a crawling itch between her shoulder blades. He didn’t try and stop her.

Rey’s muscles burned as she began hauling her body up the semi-sheer rock face. Maul didn’t say a word and Rey ignored him. He probably thought she wouldn’t make it. Or maybe, just maybe, he wouldn’t stop her from exerting herself like this. Maul had some twisted ideas about self-improvement.

It took the rest of the day, but Rey finally managed to haul herself up to the top of the caldera. The heat was intense, though Rey couldn’t see any patches of bare lava from where she was standing. Tenebrous smoke and fumes hung over the landscape and made her faintly light-headed. Rey set her expression and grimly trekked around the edge of the crater until she caught a glimpse of red-orange molten stone in the middle distance. This would be her one chance. If she missed, she knew Maul would make her retrieve the saberstaff. He still hadn’t intervened. Rey blocked his presence from her mind and calmed herself, drawing on the feel of the light side of the Force. She threw.

The saberstaff glinted in the sun as it arched toward the lava. It landed dead centre in the patch of lava. Parts of it flared as they burned away in the sudden heat. She finally turned to face Maul. He was watching her with an unreadable expression. His form had started flickering, but it wasn’t happening fast enough. ‘I could kill you now, in the time it will take for me to end,’ he pointed out.

Rey clenched her fists at her sides, willing them not to tremble. ‘You won’t,’ she said.

Maul inclined his head. ‘No. It would be a waste. You have made a lot of progress, but you should find another Sith to finish the last stages of your training.’

‘I’m not dark and I’m _never_ going to turn!’ Rey shouted.

Maul continued as if he hadn’t heard her. ‘Killing me is a good step though. You have done well, my apprentice.’

Anger and disgust welled up in Rey, but she remained silent, staring as Maul’s form finally vanished completely and the components of the saberstaff melted fully into the lava.

Something echoed through the Force. It was a sense of power passing. A discordant feeling of pride rose in Rey’s awareness and dissipated. So did a Sith name that was clearly intended for her. Rey blocked it all out as best she could. No matter what Maul had tried to do with her, she would never fall to the dark. Her name was Rey and she was going back to Master Skywalker to finish her Jedi training.


End file.
